This is England
Michael C. Moynihan | February 4, 2008, 12:14pm
From the AFP, a
recent poll suggests that a frightening number of Britons think that fictional Sopwith Camel ace James "
Biggles" Bigglesworth existed, and that Winston Churchill is a mythical, Nazi-slaying comic book character:
Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real.
The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth. And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist.
[...]
Indian political leader Mahatma Gandhi and Battle of Waterloo victor the Duke of Wellington also appeared in the top 10 of people thought to be myths. Meanwhile, 58 percent thought Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Holmes actually existed; 33 percent thought the same of W. E. Johns' fictional pilot and adventurer Biggles.
Considering the source (British cable network UKTV Gold), I think a measure of skepticism is in order, though previous surveys have come to similar conclusions. As the BBC reported back in 2001, "Sir Edmund Blackadder was a real historical figure and Adolf Hitler was the prime minister who led Britain to victory in World War II, many schoolchildren in Britain believe."
James Kabala | February 4, 2008, 9:45pm | #
"This sceptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth.... But above all, if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned. Certainly, there are all those discrepancies between one Gospel and another. But we do not deny that an event ever took place just because some pagan historians such as, for example, Livy and Polybius, happen to have described it in differing terms.... To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars.' In recent years, 'no serous scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary."
- Michael Grant (1914-2004), before his death one of the most distinguished historians of the classical period in the English-speaking world. He was also a non-believer who was skeptical of the veracity of many of the specific claims in the Gospels.
I don't think people realize how scanty the records of ancient history in general are. There are only about a dozen Greek or Roman historians in the whole period from 500 B.C. to A.D. 500 whose works survive and are worth reading, plus a dozen or so more surivors of lesser importance. Of course, the scantiness of sources can also be used as grist for the no-Jesus mill, but it is important to realize that there are not dozens or hundreds of non-Christians historians who might possibly have mentioned Jesus's existence, but only a handful, and only one (Josephus) whose main interest was Jews and Judea.
Also, people in the first century just doesn't realize that Christianity would become the dominant world relgion. It may seem suspicious to us that there is only a brief (possibly spurious) mention of Jesus in Josephus and an even briefer (almost certainly authentic) one in Tacitus, but look at this way: How many histories of the twentieth-century U.S. mention L. Ron Hubbard? Mormonism is the dominant religion in large sections of the American West, but there are otherwise good histories of nineteenth-century America that relegate Joseph Smith to barely more than a footnote. Christianity's prominence in A.D. 100 was probably greater than that of modern American Scientology, but less than that of modern American Mormonism. Its founder was, therefore, not of much interest to historians who generally centered their writing around the doings of the Roman political elite.
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